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Do you want to rest? Or do you have more fight in you?

In my last blog post, I told you about the inpatient Chemotherapy I was going to do. November 13th, Paul and I drove up to Kansas City to do my chemo session. I did three doses every other days. Something that they’ve never done before, instead of waiting for my counts to go up to be released, they actually decided to release me to the Hope Lodge.

My parents came down a week or two after that. I had intended to cook Thanksgiving dinner this year for Paul’s family and my family if they wanted to come. Hope Lodge ended up having breakfast for us and a really nice Thanksgiving dinner. I was really impressed and the food was soooo good. It almost tasted as good as if I was eating at home. Eventually my dad left, and my mom stayed. She was going to stay with me until we had the all clear I was in remission.

Unfortunately this chemo never brought me into remission. One of the days I was at the clinic. I was feeling really tired and I had a fever when I went to the clinic. They immediately did cultures on me and sent me over to the hospital. I can’t stress how sick I was at this point. They ended up finding that I had MRSA in my blood but they had caught it early enough that it wasn’t going to an issue. The issue was my white blood cells were at 100 percent blasts (cancer cells). If my body wasn’t responding to chemotherapy anymore, there isn’t much more they can do. They said if they sent me home, I wouldn’t even have three weeks to live.

My mom was in Joplin, waiting for us to go home, came back up to the city and Paul called my dad because we didn’t know how much time I would have. Before I knew it, my mom, dad, Chastity, Amanda, and little Autumn was here.

One of the mornings when I was up and starting to feel better, the doctors came in. This was a particular doctor I’ve never met before, but I trust my team so I had no reason not to trust her.She asked me if I wanted to rest, or if I wanted to keep fighting.

I’m 26 years old. OF COURSE, I want to keep fighting. I’m too young to die. They informed me that there was an option for people who basically had no other options left. It was a drug called Mylotarg. Apparently it didn’t prove safer than chemo so it was pulled from clinical trials. Recently they’ve opened it up that you can try it if you have no other options left.